Flat lens-free microscope could work inside body as an endoscope

Microscopes have existed for over 350 years but the latest development would not be recognisable to the pioneers of studying the smallest scales. A team from Rice University in Houston, Texas, which has been specialising in lens-free optics, has made an important advance in freeing microscopes from their defining component. Their primary targets are medical uses.

The team, led by Richard Baraniuk, has made a microscope mounted on a microchip small enough to sit in a fingertip, and yet capable of micron resolution. It gets past a limitation that has dogged microscopy for years: a trade-off where arrays of lenses can either gather less light from a large field of view or more light from a much smaller field.

The Rice team, which works across labs led by Baraniuk, Ashok Veeraraghavan and Jacob Robinson, had previously developed a lens-free completely flat camera, which they named FlatCam.  Developing this work with the hope of turning into a high resolution neural interface that could be implanted between brain and skull, they realised that it could have more potential as a flat microscope, which with the same nominative flair, they have named FlatScope.